Seeing Arthur Dove
I have often wondered why Louise and Walter Arensberg never purchased the work of the ingenious artist Arthur Dove. He was one of the first American modernist painters—among the very first worldwide, it can be argued, to have arrived at pure abstraction as a means of expression—and it has always seemed to me that his work would have fit naturally alongside the other pieces the couple acquired. The artist was close to the Arensbergs' business partner, Marius de Zayas, and his work was endorsed, at different times, by both Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Therefore, it is all the more curious that none of Dove's pictures can be found alongside those by his American contemporaries such as Edith Clifford Williams or Morton Livingston Schamberg in the Arensberg collection. Thankfully, the wonderful new book by Debra Bricker Balken, Arthur Dove: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things, allows a reader to better understand this lack of representation. It presents the internecine squabbles of the early modernist movement in New York, the happenstances of time and location that put distance between Dove and the Arensberg circle, and the differences of artistic intent that separated him from some of his European-emigré counterparts. Breathing new life into the somewhat tired format of the catalogue raisonné, the book (printed by our friends at Trifolio, Verona!) is a pleasure to look at and to read, as well as a natural companion to the history we present in Hollywood Arensberg.
—Mark Nelson
Left: Alfred Stieglitz. Arthur G. Dove, 1923, Gelatin silver print. 24.2 × 19.7 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Right: Arthur Dove: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things, by Debra Bricker Balken. Photo courtesy of Trifolio, Verona.
